The Origin of the Oceans

It must have been at the very beginning of my occupation
with the problems later developed in my books and in not yet published
manuscripts, that I came upon the question of the origin of salts in seas
and oceans. The common salt is a substantial ingredient of the oceanic
content, or, said differently, the water of the oceans and seas contains
a substantial solution of NaCl, or sodium chloride. Even though our blood
and tissues abound in sodium chloride, man and animals are not adapted
to drink salty water, and life on land could develop only thanks to the
evaporation of the water from the surface of seas and oceans, or to distillationthe
evaporating water is free from salts. Falling as rain or snow or dew,
it feeds underground sources and also glaciers, and through them the brooks
and rivers and lakes, and is delivered to our use usually through concrete
tubes and metal pipes.

Of the salts of the seas sodium chloride is by far the
most abundant. The provenance of it is, however, a riddle. It was, and
still is, assumed that the salts in the oceans originated mainly through
importation from land, having been dissolved from rocks by flowing rivulets
and rivers, themselves fed by underground sources, and the same process
working on the rocks of the seabed. Terrestrial formations are rich in
sodium, and in eons of time, it is assumed, the sodium washed out of the
rocks supplied its content to the oceans; the seas evaporate and the concentration
of these salts grows. But the rocks are by far not so rich in chlorine,
and hence the problemfrom where did chlorine come to contribute
its abundance to oceanic water? There is chlorine in source water, but
usually not in significant amounts. The proportion of salts in the rivers
is very different from their proportion in the seas. River water has many
carbonates (80 percent of the salts), fewer sulphates (13 percent) and
still fewer chlorides (7 percent). Sea water has many chlorides (89 percent),
fewer sulphates (10 percent) and only a few carbonates (0.2 percent).
The comparison of these figures makes it clear that rivers cannot be made
responsible for most of the salts of the seas. Therefore it is also obvious
that there is no proper way of calculating the age of the Earth by comparing
the amount of salts in the seas with the annual discharge by the rivers;
the most that can be done in this respect is to calculate the rich amount
of carbonates in the rivers in their relation to the relatively poor concentration
to these salts in the seas; but then there will be no explanation for
the rich concentration of chlorides in the seas in comparison with their
poor concentration in the rivers.

A part of the salts could be traced to the washing of
lands and the floor of the seas; chlorine is known also to be discharged
by volcanoes, but to account for the chlorine locked in the seas, volcanic
eruptions, whether on land or under the surface of the seas, needed to
have taken place on an unimaginable scaleactually, it was figured
out, on an impossible scale. Thus it was acknowledged that the provenance
of chlorine in the salts of the seas is a problem unsolved.

Paleontological research makes it rather apparent that
marine animals in some early age were more closely related to fresh-water
fauna; in other words, the salinity of the oceans increased markedly at
some age in the past.

The most obvious and permanent effect of a deluge of
extraterrestrial origin on the Earth would be the increase in its water
volume and of the place occupied by the seas. Presently four-fifths of
the Earth are covered with water. A stupendous addition of water to the
Earth should have decreased, not increased its salinity, if the water
came down in a pure state. But if the Earth was showered by torrents of
hydrogen and water some other ingredients of the Saturnian atmosphere
could also have swept across the Earths orbit.

In the Buddhist book on The World Cycles,
the Visuddhi-Magga, where the catastrophes that terminated the
world ages are described, it is said:

But when a world cycle perishes by water . . . there
arises a cycle-destroying great cloud of salt water. At first it rains
with a very fine rain which gradually increases to great torrents which
fill one hundred thousand times ten million worlds, and then the mountain
peaks of the earth become flooded with saltish water, and hidden from
view. And the water is buoyed up on all sides by the wind, and rises
upward from the earth until it engulfs the heavens.(1)

Volcanoes which were active during the cataclysm of
the Deluge and during other cosmic upheavals vomited sulphur, chlorine,
and carbonates, and contributed to the composition of the salts of the
oceans. Carbonates fell on Earth in large quantities in some of the upheavals,
certainly in the one which took place in the middle of the second millennium
before the present era, at the very end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt,
an upheaval described in detail in Worlds in Collision. But a major
portion of the chlorine in which the oceans are so rich must have come
from an extraterrestrial source.(2)

My explanation of the origin of a large portion of the
salts of the seas suggests that Saturn is rich not only in water but also
in chlorine, either in the form of sodium chloride or in some other combination,
or even atomic free. The last solution, of atomic free chlorine, appeared
chemically and biologically somewhat difficult to contemplate, because
chlorine is a very active element, seeking ties with other elements; biologically
because it would be damaging to any plant life, yet there are other indications
which point to the possibility of plant life on Saturn.

[The knowledge
that the water of the oceans came from the most part from Saturn and
that the waters were salty was combined by the Greeks into a metaphor
which has the sea being the tear of Kronos. This tradition
originated with the Pythagorean school and may derive ultimately from
Egypt. (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, ch. 32: According
to what the Pythagoreans say, the sea is the tear of Kronos.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V. 8, 20f.: This the
Pythagoreans believed . . . comparing the sea to a tear of Kronos.
The same is found in a fragment of Aristotle in the edition of V.
Rose (Teubner, 1886), no. 196. Cf. Porphyrys Life of Pythagoras
(Nauck ed., p. 39). Cf. also E. Lefebure, Etudes Egyptologiques,
Vol. III: Le Mythe osirien (Paris, 1874), p. 125: .
. . et il faut sans doute regarder comme égyptienne cette croyance
desPythagoriciens rapportée par Plutarch, que la mer
était une larme de Kronos. . . . ].